The strange machine along the streets of Madrid seized my attention. Its long arms reached out and wrapped themselves around the trunk of a tree. Its motor vibrated those arms at high speeds so they could shake the tree violently. Its net sat suspended just beneath the lowest branches. As the machine buzzed and roared,…
This week’s blog is sponsored by Reformation Heritage Books and written by Simonetta Carr—who encourages you to keep asking questions. Be sure to take a look at her new book Questions Women Asked. Unending Questions Kids ask a lot of questions. According to a 2013 British study by Littlewoods.com, girls do so more than boys,…
I find one of the trickiest areas of very practical theology to be knowing the will of God. This is an area that applies to every Christian and it is one for which there is a great deal of disagreement. Some Christians teach that we ought to expect God to provide us with guidance in…
I have written often about the issues of doubt and assurance. They are, I think, issues that are well worth spending time on. Many fine Christians spend much of their lives doubting their salvation while other nominal Christians live in reckless assurance of their right standing before God. Meanwhile, many people today teach that doubt…
This is the third article in a series that discusses that tendency Christians have to put God in a box. In the first article (link) we saw that we tend to feel insecure about God unless we have contained Him within a box in our minds and then saw that God has revealed Himself to…
A couple of years ago I got thinking about the idea of putting God in a box. This is a charge people often level at conservative Christians and Reformed folk in particular. It is not unusual for us to hear that we seem to feel that we have got God figured out, stuffed and mounted…
God, Max & Me – I’ve felt a little bit brain-dead this week. Grieved by the shallowness of my devotional life and my difficulty in making sufficient time for it, I recently decided to try a whole new approach. I now wake up an hour earlier than I used to but leave my Bible on…
A couple of months ago I wrote about the Emerging church and suggested that a movement which celebrates doubt is a movement which Christians should not be eager to join. I suggested that this movement (or conversation, as they prefer) values doubt over assurance, seeing doubt as being somehow more humble and godly than assurance.…
This is the third installment in a series of articles discussing the Christian tendency to put God in a box. In the first article we saw that we tend to feel insecure about God unless we have contained Him within a box in our minds and then saw that God has revealed Himself to us…
My family owns a beautiful cottage in the woods near one of the most picturesque villages in Ontario. This village was once a center of commerce along the Rideau Lake system – a series of canals and both natural and artificial lakes that span the miles between the cities of Kingston and Ottawa. The canal…